Re: Compiling to C (where C is used as misspelled assembly)

Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> writes:


>I've been looking for a good target language for compilation;
>something way close to machine code, with all the subroutine calls
>abstracted out to explicit stack handling, forward goto's, and
>conditional goto's, all the variables abstracted out to heavily-reused
>registers and symbol-table refs, etc.


See


              "Compiling logic programs to C using GNU C as a portable assembler",
              Fergus Henderson, Zoltan Somogyi and Thomas Conway.
              Proceedings of the ILPS '95 Postconference Workshop on Sequential
              Implementation Technologies for Logic Programming Languages.
              Portland, Oregon, December 1995.
              Available via <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/papers.html>.


This paper discusses the merits of using C, and in particular GNU C,
as exactly this sort of low-level target language. We've used this
approach in the Mercury compiler, and although it is not without its
drawbacks, in the end the results have been quite successful.


>Will modern C systems handle this?
>[Probably not. Machine generated source code always seems to break
>compilers designed for code written by humans. -John]


Although we have encountered a few bugs in various versions of gcc
that caused gcc to abort with internal errors, they have generally
been easy to avoid -- typically all you need to do is to compile the
offending file at a lower optimization level. We've carefully tested
more than a million lines of generated C code on four architectures
(and ported to several more architectures), and as far as I can recall
we've only encountered one gcc bug that required us to change the way
we generate code.
--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3
--

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